The integration of computers and telephony services has grown tremendously over the last decade. Rapidly advancing technology in combination with decreasing equipment costs have spurred the computer-telephony integration (CTI) industry to new heights. Because of these advancements, telephone service providers are now generally able to offer more complex calling services to a wider population and at a lower cost than previously available.
In the evolution of the modem communication network, all telephone services, including so-called “enhanced” services, were previously provided by telephone switches. Every time a new calling service was developed, the switch had to be re-programmed by the switch vendor to implement that calling service. Because of the enormous complexity and expense of telephone switches, new calling services were generally delayed until the new switches were implemented. This process and the enormous costs of switches typically prohibited smaller telephone service providers from introducing and implementing their own calling services.
In response to this slow progression, the industry developed a design architecture called Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN). AIN architecture allowed much of the call processing and calling services to be removed from the switches and placed in peripheral computing systems. The AIN architecture uses peripheral computing systems as service control points (SCPs), service nodes (SNs), and intelligent peripherals (IPs) to provide call processing and calling services. The telephone switch sends a data package to an SCP or and SN to provide a particular calling service or to manage the call processing. SCPs and SNs delegate certain simple decision-making tasks to IPs to complete as a part of the call service or processing. The switch is, therefore, left to perform its core function of call connection and call routing. Telephone service providers could now invest in relatively inexpensive computers with enough processing power to provide the enhanced calling services and call processing. This opened the market for calling services to the smaller telephone service providers.
The Internet has also experienced an unmatched growth over the last decade. A vast array of information and services is now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Most companies have informational web sites or web-enabled databases. Services which were previously limited to interactive calling implementation, such as information services, home banking, stock trading, and retail sales, have now become a mainstay of Internet commerce. Within the last five years, advancing technology has allowed Internet service providers (ISPs) to enter the long distance telephony market in competition with traditional telephone service providers. This evolutionary step established the potential for integration of the Internet with traditional CTI.
Recently, in the wireless phone industry, the internet has become accessible, in a limited format, over a new design of wireless phone. In addition to all of the communication services available to wireless phone users, they now enjoy limited access to the Internet over an expanded visual display on their wireless phones. While this limited integration has increased the services and information resources available to the public, the “integration” is limited simply to Internet access from which the multitude of services available or provided to the wireless customer relies on partnerships between several different, and sometimes competing, industries. It would, therefore, be advantageous to have a fully-integrated communication system which may access and supply pro-active information services from the Internet, corporate databases, and other electronic information media and also provides enhanced calling services and call management all independently from traditional Internet and telephone service providers.
A further problem exists in that as the availability of services for to a telephone user grows, so does the computing power and memory necessary for the communication device to take full advantage of such services. However, power and size requirements inherently limit the deployment of the richness of the applications and services to telephone users and particularly to mobile telephone (or other communication device) users. It would, therefore, be advantageous to integrate the intelligence and processing ability required to take advantage of the increasing sophistication of available services with a system outside of but operationally connected to the communication unit.